I don't really understand people who criticize Wikipedia as a terrible source of reliable information. Frequently it's someone citing a particular article as proof, somehow, that the other 2.7 million articles are just as inaccurate.

If you have better information, go edit the article. It's not as if the dozens, if not the hundreds or thousands of the other people who contributed to it all collectively agreed to post incorrect information.

It's certainly not infallible. My point was more that the reliability of the information increases when people claiming expertise actually contribute, rather than do nothing but criticize its reliability.

I love it, but once you start fact-checking articles, you find that it's a giant game of Telephone. It perpetuates and lends authority to slight twists of fact, which then become Known Facts. You often cannot edit out these Facts, because of the hierarchy of alpha editors who won't permit offline sources - if everyone on the Web has picked up the wikipedia factoid, the actual fact in an actual book can't shout that down.

Heh, true. Every time I contribute, my work gets deleted. It's not worth it any more. This happens in online communities like this - I actually was a paid community manager for several years on a similar site. Volunteer users have no reward beyond whatever authority they can wield over others.

I don't think the work I've contributed was terrible. Maybe it was. I've written guidelines for sites like this before, though, so I do think that I wasn't contributing crazy stuff outside the guidelines.

I completely agree with your statements, it's just that Wikipedia in practice is much less welcoming than it could be to contributions. There are a lot of powerful editors who are watching their pet areas and deleting any changes.

A terrible source of reliable information? No, probably not, anymore, but I also wouldn't call it a good source of reliable information, either, from more than a casual perspective.

Hell, any professor I had in college would have handed me my ass if I had used a secondary source when any primary source existed, let alone wikipedia. I think what gets most academic panties in a bunch is that they chose to call it an encyclopedia, which implies some level of inherent correctness.

It all boils down to whether or not you want your information from a source that has been painstakingly researched and fact-checked, or just some random collection of people that have agreed that something is correct.

Potentially, yes, if the right number of people with the right knowledge contribute, and are not 'corrected' by someone who thinks they know better. Bottom line is, a research source is intended to be right every time you look at it. Wikipedia entries are only as good as the last editor, and there's no professional, ethical, or monetary incentive for them to have been right, or even not someone intentionally making mischief. Are we establishing fact on popular concensus, now?

Wikipedia has its place and use - casual fact-checking, pursing areas of interest into related areas, etc., but I'd never treat anything I read there as fact unless I already had some knowledge in the area in question, or could verify with another source.